


Take My Hand, My Son

by SallyExactly



Series: Scar Tissue [2]
Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Found Families, Gen, Hugs all around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 13:09:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18638767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SallyExactly/pseuds/SallyExactly
Summary: Six years after the end of The Only Way Out, the team catches up with each other, and the world catches up with them.





	Take My Hand, My Son

**Author's Note:**

> For Emily S., who asked about the kids six or seven years later.
> 
> CN: bullying, fat-shaming, kids being jerks
> 
> #
> 
>  
> 
> _Tell me why you’re crying, my son,_  
>  _I know you’re frightened like everyone._  
>  _Is it the thunder in the distance you fear?_  
>  _Will it help if I stay very near?_  
>  _I am here._
> 
>  
> 
> _And if you take my hand my son,_  
>  _All will be well when the day is done._  
>  _And if you take my hand, my son,_  
>  _All will be well when the day is done._
> 
>  
> 
>  – “Day is Done,” by Peter, Paul, and Mary

"I told you this would happen if you started letting the cat sleep with us," Lucy muttered.

Garcia cracked an eye open. Possibly both eyes, but she couldn't see much of his face behind the grey lump of Prospero, curled up on his pillow.

It had been cute when she was a kitten. Now she was the size of a dinner platter.

Lucy tried to scratch one grey ear, and got a hiss for her trouble. Garcia reached out and scratched _the exact same ear_ , and the cat purred blissfully.

"Another woman is literally coming between us," Lucy added. "In  _bed_ . I don't know if I can cope with this, Garcia."

Garcia looked at her, sleepy and amused. He moved Prospero to the floor, and rolled back over to kiss Lucy good morning, very thoroughly. The cat jumped right back up, of course, but by that point there was no longer any space between the two of them. So she sat by their feet in disapproval.

"Can I make it up to you?" he murmured, voice rough with sleep. Lucy shivered. Close to ten years together— they never had figured out when to start counting— and she still...

"Excuse me," he sighed, as Prospero draped herself obstinately and uncomfortably over their  _knees_ to make her displeasure clear. He picked her up again, got out of bed, put her down in the hallway, and shut the door. Then he came back to bed, sat on the end, and considered Lucy thoughtfully. 

They'd never needed encouragement to take advantage of an opportunity to make love, but having two six-year-olds in the house made those opportunities correspondingly scarcer and therefore even more precious. "You were making it up to me," Lucy reminded him, looking up at him through her eyelashes.

"I was, wasn't I?" He stretched out on his side and pressed a leisurely kiss against her ankle.

They actually managed to bring things to a very satisfactory conclusion without being interrupted by knocking on the door and a plaintive whine of "Daddyyyyyy," or by pounding footsteps and giggling, or by ominous gurgling noises from the hall bathroom, followed by a quiet "Uhoh"... or, once, memorably, by breaking glass. Lucy lay against him contentedly, and reached up to stroke his face, his laugh lines and his greying, two-day-old scruff, the effects of which she was already feeling on her thighs.

He smiled down rather drowsily at her, and kissed her hair.

"Girls'll be up soon," Lucy murmured.

Garcia listened a moment. "They are. Or they were."

"How can you tell?" The house sounded silent to her.

"Prospero's not crying at the door. They must have let her in."

Lucy wanted to drowse against his chest like this, not get up. But mornings were easier if they got up before the girls did.

She firmly resolved to get up, made a grumpy noise, and snuggled against him. He tightened his arm around her waist, apparently sharing her feelings.

Finally he reached around her for their discarded pajamas. "Do you want the shower first?"

She shook her head. She would've liked to shower  _with_ him, but they'd really be pushing their luck waiting that long to have an adult make an appearance.

So she shrugged into her pajamas and her robe, and then went quietly down the hall to the girls' room. The door was cracked open; she silently eased it far enough that she could poke her head inside.

In the nearer bed, Elena was curled on her side, Prospero stretched out beside her. She'd fallen asleep with her glasses on, and her finger holding her place in a book. Gently, Lucy took the book, marked Elena's page with a bookmark, and put it on the nightstand. Then she eased Elena's glasses off and folded them on top of the book. Finally, she tugged the covers up over Elena's waist, unable to resist tucking her in a little.

Prospero regarded these proceedings through solemn amber eyes. She was really a two-and-a-half person cat: loyal to Garcia, devoted protector of Elena, and tolerant of Lucy.

Lucy regarded her other daughter, sprawled on her stomach with her mouth open. It honestly was not much of a surprise that Prospero didn't like her. Maybe when Alice was a little... older.

And calmer.

She considered trying to straighten the tangled mess Alice had made of her sheets, and decided it would be impossible. She did pick up Alice's cherished stuffed dinosaur, one of Ethan's last gifts before he died, and tuck it back in with her. Then Lucy slipped out and went to start breakfast.

It was one of those mornings where she actually managed to clean the kitchen, start the laundry, and have half a cup of coffee and two slices of peanut butter toast, before she heard the pitter-patter of little feet. Well, one set of pitter-patter and one set of  _thump! thump! thump!_

Alice bounced to a stop in front of Lucy, hands held limply in front of her chest, and looked up at her expectantly.

"Good morning." Lucy leaned down kiss her hair. Elena wriggled into one of the chairs at the counter and opened her book again, and Lucy kissed her, too.

"I'm a roo!" Alice said.

"I can see that." Lucy looked down at her girl, all dark curly hair and dark eyes way too big for her pale little face, no matter how much they fed her. She'd lost her first two teeth not long ago, and now she looked more like a gamin than ever. The girls were two months apart, but they didn't look like it right now. Elena was at the roly-poly stage, while Lucy and Garcia had been relieved when Alice finally  _registered_ on the height/weight charts for her age.

Lucy looked at her other girl, sitting with her head propped up on one chubby fist. "Elena, are you a roo too?"

Elena shook her head without looking up.

"What's our rule about books at the breakfast table?" And, for that matter, the lunch table and the dinner table.

"There's no breakfast yet," Elena pointed out.

Lucy glanced at the cover. "Haven't you read that one before?"

Elena nodded.

Lucy decided to fight this battle another way. "Alice, do you know what good kangaroos do?"

"They hop all over the place, and they carry their babies in their tummy pouches, and sometimes they walk on their tails, and—"

"They get breakfast for themselves and their sisters."

"Oh. Okay."  _Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!_

By the time Lucy had helped Alice pour the milk in the bowls and  _not_ on the floor, and cut up some fruit for them to have in their cereal, Garcia was showered, shaved, and dressed. " _Buenas_ ," he greeted them.

" _Buenas_ ," Elena said.

She'd been so slow to talk. Lucy had worried herself sick, wondering if this was trauma from the gunfight that had killed her parents. Wondering if she even remembered that. Garcia had worried, too, and as the one who spent more time at home, he'd done the lion's share of trying to encourage Elena to talk when she was ready. He'd read to the girls for hours, kept up one-sided dialogues with them as he worked in the kitchen or did the laundry, thought out loud to them as he worked on his Nepalese civil war book.

Alice had started talking at 12 months. Elena had not. Yet she and Elena had always seemed to be on the same page. "Alice, does Elena talk to you when we're not around?" Lucy had asked one day when it was just the two of them.

Alice had given her a smile uncannily enigmatic in a  _two-year-old_ , and bounced off to go play.

And then one day Elena had simply started talking... in full sentences. In English  _and_ Spanish. And that was that.

Now Alice bounced out of her chair. " _Buenas, papa, soy un canguro!"_

"Really?" Garcia said. "Where's your tail?"

Alice looked taken aback. "It's invisible," she said with dignity.

Lucy left Garcia to debate invisible kangaroo tails with their children, and went to shower and lay out some clothes for the girls. When she got back to the kitchen, they were still talking about it.

"Daddy, did you know sometimes kangaroos drown other animals that are attacking them?" Alice asked.

Garcia looked at her. "Are you telling me this because you know you're both getting baths after the park?"

Alice giggled in delight. "Drown Daddy," she said happily.

"Uh,  _no_ ," Lucy said. "I'm really quite fond of Daddy, and we are not drowning him." She kissed Garcia's hair, which was beginning to show speckles of grey.

He looked up at her, for a moment, with simple, open warmth, and then his expression turned teasing. "You're quite fond of me, Lucy?"

"I am, yes, is this news to you?"

He wrapped his arm around her waist. "I guess I suspected a time or two."

Lucy leaned down and kissed him. Then she pulled back and just looked at him.

They were happy. Not necessarily unstressed, unworried, or well-rested, but they were  _happy_ . She thought back to the two of them in his prison cell, all those years ago, two people with nothing left to lose deliberately striking at each other's wounds. She recalled him holding her in that filthy alley in 1888, when she hit the rock bottom of her life until then. She remembered him coming back from those disastrous trips to Zagreb, remembered him on his knees in the garage, raging at God as he finally accepted the loss of his family as, well, final.

She remembered all that, and compared where they'd started to where they were now. She had to smooth his hair back and kiss him again. From the way he looked up at  _her_ , she knew she didn't have to say anything at all for them to be on the same page.

Alice jumped down. "Let's play kangaroos," she told Elena.

"I want to play inventors like in my book."

"Yeah, inventors! And the living room is our workshop and—" The rest Alice's words were lost as she ran into the living room.

"Jiya and Rufus are inventors," Garcia told Elena. "You could ask them what it's like."

"Are they coming to the picnic?" Elena asked.

"The picnic's for them," Lucy said, checking the contents of the refrigerator. "To welcome them home from Munich."

Rufus and Jiya had taken a one-year leave of absence from MaSun to be scientists-in-residence at a German renewable energy company, with the goal of cross-pollinating ideas both ways. They'd gotten back Thursday evening, and had presumably spent yesterday sleeping off the jet lag.

"Where's Munich?"

"Germany," Garcia said. "Southern Germany."

"Where's Germany?"

"Europe." Garcia took out his phone and showed her.

Elena hopped down from her chair. "Alice we're going to play inventors in Germany!" she called, trotting out to the living room.

Lucy watched her go with a smile.

"... invent a robot German kangaroo!" Alice's voice came floating back.

"This should be interesting," Lucy murmured. The girls' imaginations could transform cardboard and a pair of old pillowcases into a truly extraordinary range of things.

Garcia rested his hand on her shoulder and kissed her forehead. "Do you want to supervise our menagerie, or go out for the food?"

An ominous "uh-oh" from the living room. "I've got this," she told him. "Go."

While holding down the fort, she only needed one bandaid— for Alice, not for herself. Alice had Garcia's fearlessness... and Lucy's coordination. Lucy had no idea what had made God think  _that_ was a good combination.

She kept an eye and a half on the girls while she triaged her email. Lucy had been so proud to hood Mikaela in the spring, and thrilled when she'd gotten a tenure-track job at a state school in her home state. Mikaela emailed her at least once a week these days, asking for advice on basically every topic under the sun related to being a new assistant professor. Today, as on many days, it was about departmental politics. Lucy had made an effort to shield Mikaela from those while she was Lucy's student, and she still thought that the right choice... but it meant Mikaela kind of felt like the minnow among the sharks, at the moment.

That could wait. Then there was the latest departmental pettiness. Two years ago, Beth had inaugurated a new research project, combining genetics, computer science, and history to trace families broken by slavery. One of their colleagues consistently referred to it as Beth's "community service project," and he'd done it again. Lucy narrowed her eyes, and typed out a rather sharp reply.

By the time she was done with that, the girls were putting the finishing touches on an imaginary German robot kangaroo. Garcia returned soon after, and the girls "showed" him. He made serious admiring noises in all the right places.

Then Garcia took Elena and Alice outside to ride their bikes while Lucy shut herself in the office and graded in a whirlwind of efficiency, which was  _not_ something she could do while watching them. She managed to get through the rest of the papers, now two weeks overdue to be returned, for her undergraduate seminar. The first papers from this class had been frankly dismal, and had made her question a.) her abilities as a teacher and b.) whether there really was something to all this whining about The Work Ethic of Young People These Days. This set were much better, and she was relieved.

She finished up, and cut up some fruit and cheese to be ready as a snack for the girls when they came inside. This was how she and Garcia did it best, tag-teaming, working together to stay one step ahead. Sometimes it felt like their life with two energetic children was one never-ending relay race.

When Garcia, Alice, and Elena came in, she got them fed, then sent them to bed for a nap. "I'm not sleepy!" Alice protested.

"You don't have to sleep, but you have to lay there with your eyes closed," Lucy recited, feeling like that sentence was tattooed on the inside of her eyelids. "I'm not taking cranky tired children to the picnic. The sooner you nap, the sooner we can go."

In reality, they were meeting at the park around one either way, but Lucy hoped the girls were still too young to understand that.

Then inspiration struck: "Maybe you'll dream about kangaroos."

Alice's eyes lit up, and she hopped down the hall. Lucy followed to make sure they both got under the covers and closed their eyes, and took the book Elena had hidden under the covers. That was pretty much a fruitless endeavor, because they had two big bookshelves in here, but she told herself it was the principle of the thing. Then she closed the door.

God, it wasn't even noon and she was already tired. They still had the picnic to get through. But the girls could run off some of this infinite energy at the park, and even if she were an exhausted zombie, it would be great to see Rufus and Jiya again. Skype wasn't the same.

It would be nice to have everyone together again. She'd really missed them.

#

Jiya was struck by the dissonance between the familiarity of the scenery, and how strangely big and far apart everything felt. And the steady sunshine of southern California. Germany was much farther north, so in the summer, there was even more of the overflowing light, but the _winter_...

She hadn't viscerally understood just how strange it was for  _Germany_ to be a world leader in solar power until they'd been there last December.

Anyway, they were back now, out of the gloom. And she'd get more sunshine, this afternoon. Once upon a time, a picnic at the park wouldn't've been Rufus's favorite thing, but after everything they'd been through, she didn't think it even registered for him. He'd hiked up the side of a volcano with her in Hawaii, after all, with only a little grumbling.

Besides. Elena Flynn-Preston was usually perfectly happy in a corner with a book, but between Grace Logan, and the helium atom Lucy had birthed, the adults usually got a lot more adult time if there were somewhere for the kids to burn off all their extra energy. At least, that had been the case a year ago, and it didn't sound like things had changed much.

The driving was strange, too. Wyatt had picked them up at the airport Thursday, and Lucy had thoroughly stocked their fridge before they returned, eliminating the need for a grocery run, so this was the first time either Jiya or Rufus had driven in nearly a year. She missed Munich's efficient public transit already.

From the way Rufus swore under his breath as he drove, he missed it too. "Remind me why we didn't go into self-driving cars that actually work, instead?"

"Fate of the world and all that?"

"Right." After a minute, he gave her a lopsided, sideways smile.

They got to the park, found parking, and carried the drinks to the shelter. Jiya looked at the familiar outlines of the people in the group waiting for them, laughing over something as they unpacked coolers and boxes, and smiled, and reached down and took Rufus's hand.

It was good to be home.

Then Wyatt looked up and spotted them, and his face lit up. Someone— Lucy or one of her kids, Jiya honestly wasn't sure which— made a high-pitched noise of excitement, and Lucy ran to meet them. Jiya barely got out "hi!" before she was enveloped in a full-on Lucy hug, the bag of soda dangling awkwardly from her wrist.

"It's so good to see you," Lucy murmured near her ear.

Jiya pulled away, and laughed. "Yeah," she said. "You too. You too."

Wyatt and Rufus were doing the hug-with-backslapping thing that guys seemed to feel the need to do— and it went on and on. Jiya got a gentle side hug from Flynn, because the years had erased all her enmity, but not their height difference. Then she and Wyatt hugged as Elena and Alice danced around all of them, chanting something about... robots? kangaroos? Robot kangaroos? Jiya wasn't sure she was hearing that right, but she never was with those two.

When she pulled away from Wyatt, Jessica was there, not coming forward any further. Some wounds... took a lot longer to heal than others, and left a lot of tender scar tissue. But Jiya still didn't hesitate to greet her, either.

They settled in around two tables. Well, the adults did. Grace sat off by herself, watching something on her phone. She'd given Jiya and Rufus a little wave when they arrived, then gone back to what looked like a soccer match. Jiya saw Wyatt look at his daughter, look at Jessica, and get a nearly identical, long-suffering look of  _I know but is it worth fighting about?_

Elena was sitting at the far corner of Jiya's table, reading. Alice was still dancing around, "helping" her father put out the last of the food. Jiya watched as Flynn managed to keep Alice from dropping anything as if it were second nature. It probably was. Apparently, some combat skills translated very well to civilian life.

"What happened to your face?" Jiya asked him as they passed plates. The black eye was faded, but still visible.

He tilted his head towards Jessica. "She did."

Jiya looked at Jessica.

"He was helping with my class," Jessica said. "Wyatt volunteers a lot, when he's around—" She gave Wyatt a smile that managed to be wry and warm at the same time. Jiya wasn't sure if that was over Wyatt's absences, or over his willingness to be the designated opponent for a class of women who were often processing trauma, or both.

"— but there's a lot of value in having the students seeing that even against someone  _his_ size, they're not helpless," Jessica added.

Jiya swallowed a bite of pasta salad, and for a moment, her mind went back to those days in the Sauna in Florida, when Lucy had grimly learned to cook to feed them all. She smiled at Lucy, who looked a little puzzled, and took Rufus's hand under the table. She looked around the table, at all of them, so improbably sitting there. Mostly whole. Mostly happy. Mostly healed.

"How's the class going?" she asked after a minute.

"It's still going really well," Jessica said. "I get some crap from the other teachers 'cause my sessions have a three month waitlist and theirs don't." She shrugged. "Not like it's a secret. Make women feel welcome and safe, make it clear that the class is more practical, less testosterone. Not that the other classes are  _bad_ , but they don't have the same... reputation."

"Any of the other teachers ever challenge you again?" Jiya asked.

Jessica's smile was a little too bright. "Not after that first time."

Wyatt looked sideways at Jess. He didn't actually  _say_ ,  _I'm proud of you,_ but he didn't really have to.

"How's the book?" Rufus asked Lucy.

"Which book?"

"I... don't know. You always have a new book going. I've lost track of what one you're working on now."

"Well, I'm putting together a proposal for a biography of Lucretia Mott. And I met a professor in computer science who found four boxes of material on Margaret Hamilton—"

Jiya's head snapped up.

"— and wasn't sure what to do with them. He thought they were of historical relevance, but... I looked through it and I barely understand it."

Rufus looked at Jiya. "The last time I saw you that close to wiggling, you really had to pee."

"I can help," Jiya said. "And even if you don't want me to help, I'm going to break into your office anyway now that you've told me you  _have her notes_ ."

"That would be amazing. The helping, I mean. Not the breaking in. Thursday?"

They set a time for Jiya to come by. Jiya realized she'd cleaned her plate without thinking about it. A whole year away had given her a new perspective on just how weird American food could be.

The table was shaking slightly, and this time it wasn't Jiya wiggling. Alice was too polite to interrupt the conversation entirely and too six to sit still. She leaned her head against her dad's arm and looked up at him, her eyes seeming to take up about half the surface area of her face. "Monkey bars monkey bars monkey bars monkey bars  _pleeeeeeaaaaaaaaase_ ," she whispered, so quickly and so many times Jiya was afraid she would pass out.

Flynn looked down at his younger daughter. "Finish your carrot sticks first."

Alice sighed, but began to chew, propping her chin up on one hand. Elena stealthily reached out and snagged two off her plate. Lucy, who hadn't even been looking, put two more carrot sticks on Alice's plate without breaking off her conversation with Rufus.

Alice sighed again, as if each carrot stick represented an individual labor of Hercules, and crunched melodramatically. It was adorable, and also made Jiya really thankful for her IUD.

Alice finished eating, and turned her big eyes on her mother. "Hey," Rufus said. "How are your monkey noises?"

Alice looked at him. "Monkey noises? I'm a kangaroo."

Rufus seemed to take this in stride. "I mean, if you're gonna play on the monkey bars, don't you have to be able to make monkey noises?"

Flynn  _looked_ at Rufus.

Alice considered this, then responded with a remarkably accurate imitation of  _some_ kind of primate.

"Yes, Alice, you may be excused," Lucy said immediately. "Elena too."

Alice grinned, climbed down, and...  _hopped?_ her way over to the playground, Elena trotting after her. Lucy watched them go with a smile.

"Thanks for that, Rufus," Flynn sighed. "We missed you  _so_ much."

Rufus grinned at him. "I know."

"If she starts asking questions about how to make kangaroos that are also monkeys, we're sending her to you," Lucy said.

"What? I'm a physicist, not a genetic engineer."

"And I'm a  _historian_ ."

After the third time in two minutes that Lucy twisted around to glance at her girls, Jiya offered, "Want to switch?" Flynn already had, like, laser vision locked in on them, but Jiya had spent enough time around her friends who were parents to know that might not be enough for Lucy.

Lucy accepted, and sat down beside Flynn with a grateful look at Jiya. "So where'd you two end up going?" she asked.

So they told her about all their weekend and holiday trips, first visiting nearby cities like Zurich, Vienna, and Prague, then going farther, to places like Paris and Zagreb. "Thanks for the recommendations," Rufus added, glancing at Flynn.

"Yeah, sure."

Shrieks cut through the air, but it was only Elena screaming in terrored delight and clutching the chains as the swing that Alice had slowly and carefully wound, very quickly and uncarefully unwound itself. Jiya hoped Elena had a strong stomach.

As Rufus was telling the others about their days in London, Grace came and stood behind her dad, whispering something in his ear. Wyatt dug into his pocket for his keys and handed them to her. She promptly ran off towards their car.

"Isn't she a little young for that?" Jiya asked, pouring herself more soda. "I mean, you're the parent, but I'm not sure she can reach the pedals..."

"Hey, I learned to drive when I was twelve," Wyatt said.

Lucy and Jessica both winced, with oddly similar looks of  _not sure you're the best example_ .

"Anyway, she just wants something out of the car," Wyatt added. "She's still in that phase where she likes soccer balls better than people."

Grace grabbed the black-and-white ball from the back seat, dropped the keys next to her dad's plate, and dribbled the ball towards the open green space. Her face lit up, expression going from shy to engaged. Jiya could relate; she'd been a shy kid for a while, preferring to hide with her old amber-screened, P3 phosphor terminal, that her dad had found in someone's trash and fixed for her, rather than actually, you know, talk to people.

"Sounds like you guys had a great time," Lucy said, sounding a little envious, and Jiya's attention came back to the conversation.

"Well... mostly," Rufus said. "Turns out: racism's a thing in Europe. I know, you're all shocked."

"At least there, when someone tells me to 'go back where I came from,' I can pretend it's about my accent," Jiya added. That didn't happen much any more, but it had happened a lot when she was a kid, out somewhere with her parents.

The others made variations on sympathetic faces and angry noises. Jiya knew they wouldn't ever truly understand what it was like for her and for Rufus, not viscerally... and while most days, she still appreciated their sympathy, she didn't want to dwell on it today.

"Yeah, but, otherwise, it was pretty great," she added. "Got to see my mom a few times." She'd gone to Beirut twice, and they'd met in Athens once.

Mom had been almost heroically restrained on the subject of children... for her, anyway. She'd gotten a lot better in the last seven years, but it was hard to shake the impression that her feelings hadn't changed, she'd just gotten better at staying silent. And Jiya didn't want to let that bother her, but it did.

Because her  _own_ feelings hadn't changed. One of their coworkers at MaSun made it clear she pitied Rufus and Jiya for not having any kids, but that was just stupid. Jiya was happy. Rufus was happy. They were happy together. They could do things like move to Europe for a year, and go visit much everywhere, much more easily than Lucy and Flynn, or Wyatt and Jessica.

They had the first part of the application to be foster parents ready to go at home, and they'd finally decided to go ahead with it. After being away for a year, it would be easier to reshape their routines and their days to make that work. But to Jiya that just felt... different. The motivation for that wasn't wanting a child; it was wanting to help someone.

She got up for more ice from the cooler, and movement on the playground got her attention. Elena was sitting under the jungle gym support post with her book, and some little white boys had clustered around her. From the looks on their faces, they weren't complimenting her taste in reading materials. One of them stuck his hand out in front of his belly and puffed out his cheeks in the universally recognized gesture of calling someone fat.

Elena scrambled to her feet, and the look of innocent confusion on her face hurt Jiya's heart. Suddenly Alice dropped from the platform above, teetered wildly, managed to keep her feet, and stood back-to-back with her sister, folding her arms over her chest with a look of fierce determination.

Jiya's mouth twitched at that, though the rest of it was less amusing. She glanced over at Lucy, who was watching with narrowed eyes and a look on her face Jiya hadn't seen since the war. One did not mess with Lucy's family, no matter how that group was defined.

Then Alice muttered something over her shoulder to Elena, and turned her back to the boys, wiggling her butt fiercely in front of them.

"... is she trying to... moon them?" Jiya asked. Generally that involved taking your pants off, but that definitely wasn't information Alice needed.

Lucy sighed. "I think she's trying to hit them with her pretend kangaroo tail."

Jiya looked at her.

Lucy shrugged.

Just as Lucy started forward, Grace Logan appeared around the corner of the jungle gym, dribbling her soccer ball. Whatever she said made the boys scatter quickly. Whatever she said to the  _girls_ made Alice look up at her with budding hero worship. Alice nodded; Elena shook her head. Alice carefully brushed Elena off and gave her a protective hug, then ran off with Grace as Elena headed back to the pavilion.

Jiya saw Flynn give Elena a quick but comprehensive look as she trotted back to the tables. The damage Flynn was concerned about, Jiya knew— through experience— would not necessarily be  _visible_ ... but Elena also didn't look particularly traumatized by her encounter with the jerks on the playground. She plopped down beside her dad, brushed some dirt out of her book, leaned against Flynn, and started reading again. Flynn looked down at her with a little smile, wrapped his arm around her, and let her snuggle closer.

"So," Jessica said, and Jiya's attention came back to the adults. "Your solar cells are... everywhere."

She wasn't wrong. Just in the drive to the park, Jiya had seen how many more roofs had solar panels on them than a year ago.

"Getting there," Rufus agreed.

"So what happens now?" Jessica added.

"We keep going, keep making them cheaper and more efficient and more durable, until they really  _are_ everywhere," Jiya said.

"And... then what? Once everything's running on solar power, you just... start charging really big batteries? Sorry," Jessica added. "I'm not a geek."

Jiya shook his head at both her scenario and her self-deprecation. "There's ways to take carbon dioxide back out of the air, but they take a lot of energy. Connor's in early talks about ideas to massively overbuild solar farms and use them to power lots of these... glorified soda plants, basically."

Jessica's eyebrows went way up. "Oh my God, you guys really are saving the world."

Jiya smirked. "What, like it's hard?"

Rufus gave her a look that she'd come to know meant  _I'm secretly super turned on by that_ . She gave him another, more private smirk.

Jiya looked up again and saw Lucy watching the two of them knowingly, the corner of her mouth tugging into a smile.

Well. Was any of this, how Rufus felt about Jiya or how Jiya felt about Rufus,  _news_ to Lucy? No, it was definitely not.

Rufus cleared his throat. "We are working on batteries too," he added.

Elena watched them quietly over the top of her book as Jessica asked more questions. They were the kind of questions that made Jiya think Jessica was getting restless again. After taking a class here and a class there ever since Grace was young, Jessica had finally gotten her degree a few years ago. But by then she'd been fairly well settled at the studio, and between that and tending bar, hadn't looked for a job that actually used her degree. Maybe that was changing now.

Jiya saw Lucy watching Grace trying to teach Alice to dribble. The key word there was trying. "I feel so guilty," Lucy muttered.

Jiya watched them for a moment, too. She didn't try to convince Lucy there couldn't possibly be a genetic component to Alice's, um, visible lack of coordination. Or that if there were, it had come from Flynn.

But Alice seemed to be enjoying herself, blissfully unconcerned with how infrequently her foot made contact with the ball. And, hey, that was what mattered.

Jiya plopped down across from Lucy. "So, catch me up on a year's worth of student hijinks."

Lucy's eye roll made for an eloquent teaser trailer.

Lucy was just finishing a story about the student stupid enough to refer to women's suffrage as a "sideshow" in her hearing when running footsteps announced the return of the thundering herd. Jiya glanced at Rufus, and he nodded.

So they handed around the presents they'd brought back from Europe. Good Highlands Scotch for Wyatt, good Swiss chocolate for Jessica. Flynn's eyebrows went up as Jiya handed him a bottle of a Croatian liquor he'd mentioned once. Lucy made pretty much the same face at the book Rufus put in front of her. A few semesters ago, after a particularly hard set of students and one too many glasses of wine, Lucy had ranted about how this particular out-of-print book wasn't available  _anywhere_ for less than a hundred fifty dollars. Jiya had found it for five pounds in a London charity shop, and had stared at the title for at least ten seconds before she realized why it sounded so familiar.

Grace's eyes lit up when Rufus handed her a soccer jersey her size, with the name of one of her favorites on Arsenal's women's team on the back. And for Alice and Elena...

Flynn pinned Jiya with a hard stare, the closest she'd seen to Murderface™ in years, as she handed each of the girls a hyper-realistic one-thirtieth-scale model of a humpback whale. She smirked at him.

"Oh, they make noise," Rufus added, as the girls squealed in delight.

Flynn waited until the girls were out of earshot to mutter, "At least it's not another board game."

Jiya winced. "I am actually sorry about that one."

Lucy made a face. "We became  _experts_ at stacking the deck to lose in the least amount of time possible."

Grace had pulled on her jersey, and now was talking to her mom, bouncing from foot to foot. "You  _promised_ ," she whispered.

"I did promise," Jess admitted a little wryly, and got to her feet. "Excuse me," she told the rest of them. "I have a soccer date."

Grace straightened up in excitement, and waited impatiently as Jess pulled back her hair. Then mother and daughter headed out to the big field again, passing the ball back and forth. Jiya watched Wyatt watch them go, his smile warm and lopsided.

Rufus got his attention then, showing Wyatt something on his phone. Probably the photos from the Normandy memorials, considering Flynn was also watching over Rufus's shoulder. Neither Rufus or Jiya were big into military history, but one of their colleagues in Munich, an American ex-pat, had recommended Normandy as a place to visit, so they'd checked it out.

Jiya got up for some more chips.

"How was Munich for vegetarian food?" Lucy asked.

"It was  _amazing_ . I miss it already. We found this restaurant that does amazing veggie wurst, and Rufus promised to try to replicate it for me." Hearing his name, Rufus looked up. She smiled at him. He smiled crookedly back.

Jiya sat down again and gave Lucy the rundown on a few of her favorite Munich restaurants as they shared the plate of chips. "What about you?" she said finally. "Any travel plans on the horizon? I know you and Flynn wanted to take the girls to Croatia someday—"

Lucy gave her daughters a wry, rueful look. "Nope," she said. And she really didn't have to say anything more.

"We did take them to Spaceland last month," Lucy added after a minute.

"How'd they like that?"

"They loved it." She crunched down on another potato chip. "Elena loved the rocket ship ride so much that she went on it four times in a row, and Alice went with her so she didn't have to go alone, and then promptly puked up her space dots."

Jiya winced. "So, what I'm hearing you say, is you and Flynn loved it less."

Lucy shrugged. "Honestly, it was fine. I guess... whenever things like that happen, some small part of me is thinking, it could be so much worse."

They exchanged looks. Jiya knew  _exactly_ what she meant.

"You still training for that ten K?" Jiya asked after a moment, and settled in to catch up on all the little things she'd missed over the last year.

#

"Rufus and I don't think the airship idea is very practical," Jiya said, "but Connor did get that grant from the Lamarr Foundation—"

"EULAAAAAAAAAAAAALIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAA!"

Alice's yell distracted Lucy. What— okay, there she was. Next step, figure out  _why_ her daughter, who did nothing by halves, was screaming defiance from the top of the monkey bars.

"Show of hands, anyone surprised Lucy's kid is yelling in Greek?" Wyatt asked. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

"That's not Greek," Lucy said. The boys who had hassled Elena were back, and now they were standing around below Alice. One of them called something to her that Lucy didn't catch.

"It's a... made-up language from one of their books," Lucy added. She and Garcia had spent months reading it to them at bedtime. Alice and Elena's consensus was that Daddy did better accents but Mommy did better voices.

She watched the scene carefully from the edge of the shelter. She wasn't going to be the parent who swooped in any time her child had a problem, but she also would be damned if she'd let those sharp-tongued boys give either of her girls more trouble than they could handle. The one was making exaggerated, comical running motions, arms and legs going all over the place, and laughing up at Alice, and, yep, it was time to—

"Oh, a made  _up_ language."

Lucy gave Wyatt a sideways look. "They really love— where's Elena?"

She wasn't in the pavilion any longer. Garcia turned quickly, starting to systematically check everywhere, and then relaxed. Lucy followed his line of sight back to the monkey bars. Elena had planted herself in front of one of the little boys, book in one hand. Lucy couldn't hear what she was saying, but the other kid got redder and redder—

"Let me go stop World War III before it starts," Lucy said resignedly.

"I'll go." Garcia stepped around the table.

"I can—"

"Because I think she's stuck."

"I can reach the top of the monkey bars," Lucy said with dignity, but he was already striding across the playground. Not a moment too soon; the little boy Elena was talking to burst into tears.

"...  _dang_ ," Rufus said.

Garcia scooped Alice off the monkey bars, settled her on his shoulders, and took Elena by the hand. Alice looked pleased with her mount; she grabbed Garcia's hair like it was reins. Elena looked less pleased to be removed from the battlefield.

"Elena," Lucy said gently, in her best calm, reasonable parent voice, when they'd returned to the shelter, "is it a good idea to make people cry on the playground?"

"Yes, if they upset Alice." Elena climbed back onto the picnic table and calmly opened her book again, propping her head up on her hand.

Lucy stood there with her mouth open, not sure what to say to that. Garcia was no help, trying not to laugh, and Wyatt seemed to be overcome with coughing.

And then Lucy remembered Amy, and what she herself would've done to protect her own little sister, and suddenly it wasn't funny at all.

She looked up to find Garcia watching her, no longer laughing. His astuteness at the beginning of their relationship had deepened, over the last almost-a-decade, into a near-psychic sensitivity to her moods and thoughts. Now, he sat down beside Elena, waited until she looked up from the book, and talked to her quietly, face serious. Lucy turned away, grateful that she didn't have to do that, grateful for the moment to compose herself.

She turned back around. Garcia wasn't the only perceptive one; Rufus and Wyatt were both watching her with concern. She managed a smile, which of course did not fool or distract them.

Amy would have loved Lucy's daughters. Lucy pictured her reading to them, taking them to the park, teaching them all kinds of mischief. Amy had had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, and Lucy— safe in the false security of thinking she herself did— had really looked forward to seeing what Amy chose, knowing whatever it was, it would be fantastic. Now she'd never know.

There were nights Lucy woke at three am bitterly regretting that they had no more time machines. If they had, they could have at least  _tried_ ...

But during those white nights, she remembered how grateful she was not to be protecting history any more. And she thought of Elena, and  _knew_ there was no way she could ever, ever bear to disrupt those Wallace kids having found a family of their own. Not even for Amy.

She swallowed, and saw the hint of mutiny on Elena's face as she listened patiently to her dad, and managed, after a moment, a real smile.

"You okay?" Jiya asked quietly.

"Yeah," Lucy said after a minute. "Uh, yeah."

Jiya didn't look convinced, but excused herself, after a minute, to go find a bathroom. Garcia kissed Elena's hair and turned to talk to Rufus. Elena picked up her book again. Lucy blinked: that wasn't even the same book she'd been reading this morning, which meant she'd somehow smuggled another one to the park.

Well. Most parents would be delighted their kid was reading so much. Lucy was  _too_ , and she certainly wasn't gonna start shaking Elena down for hidden books before they left the house. Elena had seen everyone but Jiya and Rufus last week, and she'd probably see them all again next week. It wasn't the end of the world if she ignored everyone for a book, this once.

And Lucy would be much happier if she pretended it  _was_ just this once.

Grace and Jessica came back to the pavilion— Grace looking a lot more energetic than her mom— which distracted Lucy from her own thoughts. "Hey, you looked pretty good out there," Wyatt told his daughter, mussing her hair affectionately. She rolled her eyes at him, but smiled.

Jessica flopped down across from Lucy. She rummaged in the cooler for ice. "Thought I was in better shape than that," she panted.

"If you ever need to feel good about your soccer skills, my offer of a game stands."

Jessica snorted, and drank her water down, watching Grace thoughtfully. Lucy twisted, but Grace was just talking with Rufus and her dad. Lucy looked back at Jessica, and saw that the other woman's face looked like hers probably had, just a moment ago.

"What is it?" Lucy asked softly.

Jessica swallowed, but didn't try to deny what Lucy had seen. Finally she said, "She's nine."

Lucy nodded.

"When I was nine..."

Oh. They'd had this conversation before, sort of. Jess had never quite become a close friend like the rest of them— she'd been busy raising Grace and adjusting to life on her own terms, and by the time she'd seemed to forgive herself to the point that she could consider that kind of friendship, she'd already made friends at the bar, and at the studio. And that was fine.

But Lucy and Jessica had their own, different bond: they knew what it was like to raise children in the shadow of Rittenhouse.

"I dream sometimes that I never get away," Jessica said quietly. "That they get her, too."

Lucy understood this, too. She  _still_ had nightmares that some rogue faction of Rittenhouse, lying low all these years, would find and kidnap Alice to indoctrinate, as David Rittenhouse's heir, just like they'd done to John's children all those years ago.

"Worst of all are the dreams where I never  _try_ ," Jessica added.

"You did try," Lucy said, quiet and firm. "And you succeeded. Jessica— they tried to brainwash me, too. I  _know_ — no, I don't know what it was like. Not for you. But I know what it was like for me, and I know it must have been so much worse for you. And yet you still decided to think for yourself. And you got away, and you made a better world. For her."

Jessica's eyes were shiny with tears. After a moment, she nodded slowly.

"And you're teaching other women how to protect themselves," Lucy added. Maybe not from the likes of Rittenhouse, tentacled monster that it had been, but from more mundane, and far more common, threats.

Jess made a face. "Sometimes I still feel like that's a bandaid."

"How many of your students would agree?"

Jessica winced, but didn't argue. Lucy knew her students credited her classes not only with teaching them self-defense skills, but with teaching them a self-defense mindset— a confidence in their choices to counteract the unrelenting currents of  _don't make a fuss!_ in which all women swam.

Jiya came back, and looked between the two of them before sitting down. "Everything, uh, okay?" she asked Jessica.

Jessica nodded. "Yeah," she said. "I think so."

Jiya eyed her, but didn't press the issue.

Elena needed the bathroom just then, so Lucy took her. As soon as they got back to the shelter, Alice said  _she_ needed to go, and so they trooped back to the bathroom, Elena coming along just because. When they got back to the shelter, Elena sat down with her book again, Alice settled down next to Garcia and leaned against him, and Lucy rejoined Jiya and Jessica.

Jiya glanced at Lucy. "Did I tell you we went to Bletchley Park?"

Lucy straightened up. "No, tell me about it."

"What's Bletchley Park?" Jessica asked.

"It was a code-breaking center for the British government in World War Two," Lucy said. "It was hugely important in helping the Allies win the war. And, actually, it was mostly staffed by women."

Jess sipped her iced tea. "Do I have to guess who got the credit?"

"No," Lucy and Jiya chorused. They all exchanged knowing looks.

" _And_ they have the National Museum of Computing," Jiya added. "It was pretty cool. Some of those machines I've only ever read about. They're like antiques. They're like  _fossils_ ."

Lucy gave Jiya a thoughtful look. Margaret Hamilton's papers, and Bletchley Park... and Lucy already had experience collaborating with non-historians, thanks to the book she'd written with Garcia, and then the one he'd written on the Nepalese War for which she'd been kind of an advising partner...

It was a good thing Jiya was coming by on Thursday. They might have more to talk about than Lucy had planned.

"Oh my God, where does she get the  _energy?_ "

Lucy followed Jessica's look and saw Grace running back towards the big open area, dribbling the ball. She turned back. "It's a mystery," she said solemnly. "If we ever figure out where they get it from, Jiya and Rufus might be out of a job."

Jiya snorted.

Alice had gotten increasingly wiggly as she sat and listened to her dad, swinging her short little legs under the table. Now she got up and wandered over to her sister, but whatever Elena said, not looking up from her book, made Alice pout. But then Elena handed her another book— seriously, where was Elena  _getting_ these? oh, that was the one she'd been reading this morning, she must've brought them both— and Alice, after a moment's thought, settled down beside Elena and cracked open the book.

"Okay, that's kind of adorable," Jessica said, watching them.

Lucy smiled. "I know."

Lucy looked where Jiya was looking, on the other side of the shelter. Rufus, Wyatt, and Garcia were having an animated conversation about— something, but on the other side of them... A little boy in too-small shoes, eyes huge behind his owlish glasses, dark hair standing straight out from his head in an adorable Afro, was watching them, arms wrapped tightly around himself. After a minute, he took one tiny half-step closer. Then another.

Another minute or two and Wyatt, who, like Garcia, had to have known he was there as soon as he appeared, looked over. "Hey there," he said with a smile.

"'scuse me," the little boy said. "Hi."

"Hi," Rufus said.

"Um I was just wondering," the boy said. "I was just wondering if you um. You look like Dr. Carlin. The scientist."

Rufus was visibly taken aback. "Uh, yeah, I am."

The boy's eyes got even wider, and he just stared up at Rufus.

Jiya put her hand to her mouth to hide a smile.

"So you, uh, you know Rufus?" Wyatt prompted.

The boy just kept staring. "You were on TV," he blurted finally.

"Uh, yeah, sometimes. Occasionally. Like, twice." Rufus rubbed the back of his neck.

"Xavier... Xavier!" A Black woman came running up, out of breath. She looked a lot like Xavier. "You can't just run away and then interrupt these folks—" She spotted Rufus. "... oh."

The woman cleared her throat. "Um, sorry he's bothering you, he... uh, he kind of looks up to you."

Rufus blinked.

"The, um, the New York Times profile of you and your partner, he has that taped to his wall at home," the woman added.

"... oh," Rufus said slowly, his eyes about as wide as Xavier's, now.

"You were at my school," Xavier blurted. "With the solar cells. You put the solar cells on the roof and then, and then you talked to us."

"Oh, yeah, we did," Rufus said. "National City, right?"

"It was really cool!" Xavier's shyness was wearing off. "My grandma has this light and it was busted and so I took it apart and now it works again!"

"You did? Man, that's pretty good," Rufus said. "What did you do to get it to work again?"

"Well— one of the wires had kinda wiggled out of place, you know?— and—"

Garcia slid out of his seat and patted the bench, and Xavier settled in across from Rufus without hesitation as he continued to talk. Wyatt was smiling. "Want something to drink?" he asked the woman.

"Oh, no, we couldn't—"

"Somewhere you gotta be?"

"No, but I'm sure  _he_ does."

Rufus glanced up. "Nope," he said, and turned his attention back to Xavier.

Jiya got up. "Hi," she said, approaching the woman. "Don't worry about—"

The woman looked up. "You're—"

"Jiya," Jiya said firmly, and offered her hand. "Hi."

The woman shook it hesitantly. "Latoya. I'm Xavier's mom."

"You wanna sit down? I  _think_ they might be a while. If that's okay with you, of course."

So Latoya settled in beside them, one sharp eye on Xavier, and they all did introductions. Lucy kept an eye on her girls, but after watching the new arrivals, they'd gone back to their books. Well, Alice was spending about half her time reading over Elena's shoulder instead, but they were quiet and non-destructively occupied. Soon Jiya and Latoya were deep in conversation about the science classes at Xavier's school, and the after-school program MaSun was piloting. Xavier was sketching something on a piece of scrap paper Rufus had found.

It was a good half hour before Latoya said, "We really do gotta go. I gotta get him back home to my mom so I can go to work." She looked at her son wistfully.

"Call next week," Jiya urged her. "Seriously, the three of us? We all  _love_ to give kids chances to engage with science."

Latoya was nodding slowly. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, thank you. Xavier, baby, time to go."

When the two of them were gone, Jiya went to stand behind Rufus. "This job does have its moments," he muttered.

Jiya caressed the back of his neck. "These damn ninjas just follow you everywhere, huh?" Her voice was teasing and tender.

"... ninjas?" Lucy said.

"Ninjas," Jiya said firmly.

Lucy eyed Alice and Elena. After they'd all shifted to give Xavier and Latoya places to sit, the girls had gravitated to Garcia. Now Elena was sitting on his lap, and Alice was leaning against his side, eyes drooping. Should Lucy encourage them to head back to the playground to burn off more energy so they'd be easier to keep up with tonight?

As she watched, Alice scooted sideways and slow-motion keeled over until she could rest her head against Garcia's leg. She closed her eyes and wriggled until she got comfortable. Garcia reached down and gently took the book from her hand, marking her place with a napkin.

Well, that answered that. Garcia looked up and saw Lucy watching, and smiled at her. The smile reached his eyes, and her heart, and Lucy smiled back reflexively.

The tables got quiet, just the natural lull of conversation. "I'm going to go check on Grace." Wyatt got to his feet and stretched. "See if she wants to wear out  _both_ parents."

Elena lowered her book. "You were in the paper?" she asked Rufus. "You and Jiya?"

Rufus looked abashed. "Yeah..."

"We have it at home," Garcia told her. "I'll show it to you when we get back, okay?"

"Okay." Elena leaned back against her dad and started reading again. Lucy shifted over next to Rufus and asked for his take on Bletchley Park.

After a few minutes, Grace and Wyatt returned to the shelter. Grace headed straight for the cooler, refilling and draining her cup a few times. Then Wyatt's phone went off.

Jess frowned at him. "Thought you had that on silent."

Wyatt looked at the screen. "I did," he said grimly. He took several steps out of the pavilion before he answered it, and stood with his back to them.

Jessica started packing up.

Lucy frowned. "What is it?"

"The only number Wyatt has programmed to  _always_ ring is from Pendleton," Jessica said quietly. "And it's the number they only use in emergencies." She hesitated. "Big ones."

Lucy looked at Jiya and Rufus and Garcia. Without saying anything, Lucy, Rufus, and Jiya began to help.

Wyatt hung up and came back to the shelter. His face was set.

"What is it?" Lucy asked, seeing that no one else was going to.

Wyatt hesitated. "It'll be on the news soon enough," he finally muttered. "Saudi Arabia. They've been building their strength on the Red Sea for months, and now... it looks like they're about to move."

"Against... who?" Lucy tried to picture the Middle East, but in her unease, it was difficult. "Israel?"

Wyatt shook his head. "Ethiopia."

"...  _Ethiopia?_ Why?"

"Water," Garcia guessed.

Wyatt gave him a single nod.

"Does Ethiopia  _have_ a lot of water?" Lucy felt bewildered.

"More than Saudi Arabia," Wyatt said grimly. "And they have the technology to clean it up."

"But," Lucy said.

"They punch through Eritrea, head towards Addis Ababa," Garcia guessed, faced shadowed. "They don't have to hold for long. They just have to convince the government it's better to strike a deal for a pipeline under the Red Sea than to fight them."

"But... they just bought a hundred megawatts of panels from us to run a huge new desalination plant," Jiya said.

"Guess it wasn't enough."

The silence was loud.

"We've been watching four different water hotspots for years," Wyatt added. "They're not the only ones who've nearly tapped out their groundwater. Something like this was... pretty much inevitable."

"How soon are they sending you?" Jessica asked quietly.

"For now, they just want me as an adviser," Wyatt said. "But they want me there two hours ago." He glanced at Rufus. "Rufus, Jiya, could you—"

"Yes," Jiya said. Home was in the opposite direction from the base for Wyatt; he'd get there faster if someone else could take Jessica and Grace, and Lucy and Garcia only had one spare seat.

"You're going to work?" Grace sounded disappointed.

"I have to," Wyatt told her. "I'm sorry." He put his hand on her shoulders and said a little more, too soft for Lucy to hear. Grace nodded, eyes downcast. Wyatt kissed her hair, looked at the rest of them, grimaced an apology, and headed for the parking lot.

The mood was somber, and no one suggested they stay. "What is it?" Elena asked, watching the grown-ups. "Daddy, what happened?"

Garcia hesitated. "A country wants to invade another country."

Elena looked confused. "Why?"

"For water. They don't have enough water for everyone to drink."

"Well, why don't they just ask for more?"

Garcia hesitated again.

"Maybe they will," Lucy said. "There's smart people working on this, and maybe they can get it worked out by talking. And not fighting."

"Is that where Wyatt went?"

"... sort of."

Suddenly Grace burst into tears. Jessica put her arms around her daughter and let Grace bury her face against Jessica as she sobbed, gently rocking back and forth with her.

Lucy and the others exchanged looks.

It felt like there was nothing they could do here. Lucy, Rufus, and Jiya loaded the two cars, giving the Logans a little privacy, and then Garcia carried the still-sleeping Alice to their car. Lucy hugged first Rufus, then Jiya. "It's good to see you," she murmured. "Dinner next week?"

"Yeah."

Alice woke up as they pulled out of the parking lot, but the car ride home was still quiet— even more than car rides usually were now, with electric vehicles taking over the roads. To distract the girls from the picnic's jarring end, Lucy got out her phone, pulled up the New York Times article on Rufus and Jiya, and handed it back to the girls to read. The photo was the two of them standing back-to-back, arms folded, looking determined. Rufus had said it made him feel really dorky, but Lucy loved it.

"'The solar saviors,'" Elena began.

Lucy smiled. Rufus and Jiya had had opinions about that headline.

"'Connor Mason is now a household name, and his story, from rags to riches to ruin to back again, is nearly as familiar. In the last eight years, his new ent— ent—'"

"Enterprise," Lucy said.

"'Enterprise has quietly risen to prominence in the ranks of green tech.' What's prominence?"

"Importance," Lucy said. "Importance and, um, being visible."

Elena kept reading. "'But Mason has not achieved this remarkable trans— transformation alone. Two survivors of his old company, physicist Rufus Carlin and engineer Jiya Marri, though often assumed to be Mason's lieu— lieutenants—'" She pronounced it with four syllables. "'— are in fact full business partners.'"

Lucy had read the article enough times that, as Elena kept going, she could silently recite a good chunk of it from memory. It wasn't every day your best friends were in the New York Times.

"'It has not gone unnoticed that possibly the most rev— rev—'"

"Revolutionary," Garcia said, as they pulled up to their house. Like many houses in the neighborhood, it, too, had Marlin cells across the roof.

"'Revolutionary company of the still-young century is headed by two Black men, one an immigrant, and the daughter of Lebanese immigrants,'" Elena was saying, as she unbuckled.

Finishing the article kept the girls occupied and out of trouble as Garcia and Lucy unloaded the car. Then Alice said, "Let's play kangaroo inventors!"

"Bath time," Garcia said.

Alice looked up at him. "Kangaroos drown people, Daddy," she reminded him solemnly, eyes wide.

Garcia stared down at her, face very,  _very_ serious. Alice cracked first, and started to giggle, and that shadow at the corner of Garcia's mouth deepened.

Garcia bundled the girls into the tub. One unexpected side effect— unexpected to Lucy, anyway— of his three decades fighting was that he could handle nearly anything. He certainly got a lot less overwhelmed than Lucy by supervising bath time for two rambunctious six-year-olds whose arms and legs seemed to multiply as soon as they got in the water.

Lucy smiled at the squealing as she started dinner, then put in a load of laundry. She wasn't particularly surprised when Garcia reappeared in a fresh change of clothes, his others presumably drenched.

After dinner, Lucy cleaned up while Garcia supervised the girls picking out clothes for the morning. They'd learned through long experience that getting out the door to church and Sunday school went  _a lot_ smoother that way. She cleaned the sink and went to see what they'd picked out, because... she was trying not to check the news. She'd hear if someone texted, but besides that...

She'd hear soon enough. Whatever there was to hear.

Not surprisingly, Alice had picked out a dress. She liked dresses, or rather, she liked the way the skirts flared out when she jumped down the stairs. Lucy still remembered the absolute  _terror_ of hearing her four-year-old call, "Look, Mommy, I can fly!" After that, they'd made a strict rule about how high up Alice could jump from.

Elena hated dresses, and Garcia and Lucy had not tried to make her keep wearing them when this became apparent. Lucy had only stipulated that, whatever Elena wore, it had to be "respectful to God." Elena had thought about that for a good day or so, asking Lucy and Garcia detailed questions about their wardrobes and what they wore for fancy occasions. Lucy had been secretly dreading trying to find dress pants for her when Elena had announced she wanted a necktie. So, Elena now had more little neckties than some boys her age, and Garcia gravely tied them for her each Sunday. For tomorrow, Elena had picked the green necktie with the blue shirt and her black shorts.

The girls played quietly in their room while Garcia and Lucy sat on the couch, her head in his lap. She gave in to temptation and checked the news, but despite the abundance of serious-faced people reporting on Saudi Arabia, she learned nothing Wyatt had not already told them.

How bad would it get? Would Wyatt be sent overseas again?

"I just want to tell them they're being idiots," she said suddenly. "You know?  _We_ saved the world, and now someone else is screwing it up."

Garcia snorted. Yes: he'd fought in enough wars that that feeling had to be very, very familiar.

It took so many people to save the world, and so few to utterly fuck it up.

She reached up and gently stroked the lines of his face, trying to focus on what they had rather than the ever-present fear, intensified by the news of war, of losing it. He closed his eyes and smiled.

She yawned. "I could sleep here," she said around the yawn. Except they had to put their girls-of-boundless-energy to bed first.

She wriggled reluctantly off of his lap, sat, and then stood. He winced a little when he put his weight on his right leg, and Lucy steadied him.

Garcia knocked gently on the doorframe of the girls' room and then stepped inside, reaching for the new book they'd just started. Alice scowled fiercely up at them when they appeared in the doorway. She had her favorite stuffed dinosaur in one hand and her new whale in the other, and it looked like they'd interrupted gladiatorial combat. "Daddy, I'm  _not tired_ . Let me stay up!"

Lucy felt Garcia stiffen. Gently, she took the book from his hand, and stroked her fingers against his other wrist. She stepped forward, caught his eye, and tilted her head fractionally towards the door. He closed his eyes, but took her up on it.

"I know," Lucy said as Garcia disappeared. "But I am. So pretend and make me feel better, okay?" She opened the dresser and handed each girl a nightgown.

While they were brushing their teeth and washing up, she settled into the armchair. She'd put  _herself_ to sleep in that thing more than once. The girls came back and climbed into bed, and Alice only bounced out three times— once for her dinosaur, once to make sure her new whale had a blanket, once to take the whale into the bathroom for a pretend drink.

Lucy cracked open the battered paperback and began to read. A page, and she lowered her voice; another page, and she lowered it more. Denise had taught her that trick, after Lucy had called her in tears one night, sobbing  _my children are mutants and they never sleeeeeeeeeeeep_ .

"'We might be some good to her,'" she read, and then saw that Elena was asleep. She stopped there, and put the ribbon at the right paragraph; that was the rule, so neither of the girls ever missed any of the story.

Alice looked at her mutinously from under drooping eyelids. "Still not tired."

"I know, baby." Lucy put the book down and went to sit on the edge of Alice's bed. "'Wynken and Blynken and Nod one night,'" she began to sing softly, stroking the hair of her  _absolutely not at all not one bit sleepy_ daughter. "'Sailed off in a wooden shoe...'"

Some nights it took several songs. Tonight, Alice was tired out from the playground; her eyes began to close before Lucy finished. "Not sleepy," she whispered at the end, in the cadence another child might have used to say  _good night_ , and drifted off to sleep.

Lucy waited several minutes, to make sure she really  _was_ asleep. Then she leaned down, gently kissed Alice's hair, and got up.

"Mommy?"

She froze, almost at the door. It wasn't Alice; it was Elena, watching her from under lowered lashes. Sometimes this was like playing whack-a-mole, though she wouldn't put it past Elena to have been faking before.

At least they no longer had to put the clocks forward to trick their exhausted daughters into just  _going to bed_ instead of staying up on principle.

Lucy crouched by  _her_ bed. "Yes, sweetie?"

"Mommy," Elena whispered again. Lucy stroked her hair. After a moment, Elena said, "Who's Iris?"

Lucy did not freeze. She stroked Elena's hair again. "Where'd you hear that name?" She tried to think if she and Garcia had recently been talking...

Elena shrugged.

Lucy sighed internally. This wasn't a conversation she wanted to have with Elena right before bed. But Elena was a perceptive girl, and had apparently realized there was some mystery or tragedy attached to the name. And Lucy  _couldn't_ think of a time recently she or Garcia had said Iris's name, which meant this might've been on Elena's mind for a while. She  _didn't_ want to tell her, but she wouldn't let Elena fall asleep worrying.

She'd always known they'd have to have this conversation, one day, to tell the girls that Daddy had had another family once. Like Elena had. All the girls knew about  _that_ right now had been in response to someone telling Alice at school, "your sister can't be two months older than you!" They'd explained that Alice had come out of Mommy's tummy and Elena had come out of someone else's tummy; Lucy had quickly added, "it happens like that sometimes."

Which had led to the ever-observant Alice asking a pregnant lady at church the next week, "Is the baby going to come out of you or someone else," and they'd had to explain that, no, they hadn't been letting their four-year-old watch  _Alien_ .

That had been an awkward conversation, but she would prefer to have that one again rather than this.

Lucy glanced over at Alice, but she was still asleep. That was the one good thing about Alice's sleeping habits— Elena slept easily but woke up easily, too, while Alice was a very heavy sleeper once she was actually out. "Iris was Daddy's little girl," she said quietly.

"What happened to her?"

"Oh, sweet girl," Lucy whispered, part pity, part pain. But she would not let her daughter fall asleep wondering why Iris wasn't  _still_ Daddy's little girl, and if that would happen to her, too.

Lucy swallowed. "Baby, she died."

"Am I going to die like that?" Elena sounded sleepily curious, not concerned.

" _No_ ."

Lucy hadn't heard Garcia come back, but his low growl, in a tone she hadn't heard since the war, did not startle her.

Her eyes met those of the fierce, grim man she'd met in the war, who'd suddenly reappeared in their daughters' bedroom. She saw how much courage, how much  _everything_ , it took him to say it. Rittenhouse was gone, but what other horrors were out there? Of which they were just as ignorant as they had been of Rittenhouse, before it ripped both their families apart?

Slowly, he lowered himself all the way down to kneel by Elena's bed. "No," he repeated, devastatingly soft and gentle. "Go to sleep, dear one," he whispered.

Elena, eyes closed, nodded sleepily.

After a moment, Garcia stood, and then nearly evaporated from the room. The hall bathroom door closed. Lucy waited with Elena until she was sure she was sleeping again. When she checked the bathroom, she found the door open.

She checked their bedroom; empty, except for Prospero on the pillows. The couch was empty, as was the kitchen and the back deck. She checked the girls' bedroom again. Empt. Lucy headed back to the living room to see if the front door was locked, and found him on the couch.

He sat with his elbows on his knees, head bowed. He didn't react when she joined him on the couch and rested her hand between his shoulder blades. What she could see of his face looked haunted.

Alice and Elena were older now than Iris ever had been. If Iris had lived, Alice would never have been born. Elena would have found a different family.

She knew, because he'd told her, that he still pictured Iris growing up. Pictured her reaching all her milestones. If Iris had lived, she'd be seventeen, now. There would've been driving lessons, and college applications, and prom dresses, and probably confusion over boys and/or girls, and...

She began to rub the scar on his thigh, putting muscle into it like his physical therapist had taught them both. His shoulders slumped fractionally down, and she heard him exhale softly. After a while, he gently caught and stopped her hand, and gathered her against him, resting his face against her hair.

"The only thing keeping me from sleeping in front of their doorway," he began after a while, voice gravelly.

"Is knowing it would freak them out?" Lucy guessed, when he didn't go on.

"Knowing it wouldn't do any good."

Ah. So they were past the 'knowing it would freak them out' stage.

After a few minutes, he eased himself down onto the couch. When she followed, he turned onto his side, making as much space as possible. She tucked herself against her chest, and remembered all the nights they'd spent like this in those earliest days, in Florida and Nebraska. Kind of fitting, that they'd come full circle to another couch tonight, after the two that had shaped the early course of their relationship.

She felt him exhale slowly, and settle more heavily against the cushions.

The cushions shifted as Prospero jumped up beside them and stretched out majestically on the very edge of the couch as if she had feet to spare. Her tail just barely stopped short of Lucy's chin. Lucy rolled her eyes. Garcia snorted.

"Why is it always  _my_ face your cat points her butt at?" Lucy whispered.

"Cat affection."

"Bullshit."

Garcia snorted again, this time something closer to a real laugh.

"I'll take the girls in the morning," she murmured. Some weeks he went with them to church, some weeks he didn't; he'd gotten in the habit of going at all when the girls were younger, and a lot for Lucy to manage on her own. He'd known it meant something to her to go, and meant something further to her to take the girls.

He always sat very stiffly through the service, on the days he didn't slip out altogether, but he liked talking with Mother Robyn. Or arguing with her. It had taken him a few years to learn the priest was basically un-shockable.

Now he shook his head.

"Garcia, you don't... even  _like_ going." Possibly an oversimplification, but not far from the truth.

"I like spending time with them," he whispered. "And you."

Lucy didn't argue further.

After a few more minutes, he shifted. Lucy made an interrogative noise: she didn't have any problem sleeping here if he didn't, though admittedly the cramped quarters were less comfortable now that they were older.

"I wanna be where I can hear," he muttered, and Lucy understood that, too.

"Then  _you_ move the cat, or I'm the one she's going to claw."

"She hasn't done that since she was a kitten." But Garcia reached over Lucy and picked Prospero up until she grudgingly stood on her own feet.

"Once was enough."

They stumbled to their own bedroom. Garcia looked in on the girls, then slipped silently inside— checking the window locks, Lucy guessed. Prospero followed him in, but stayed inside when he came out again. Lucy did not object to  _that_ at all.

They had more space in bed than on the couch, but once they were horizontal, Garcia gently pulled her against him. He wanted her close, tonight, and she had absolutely no objection.

She drew gentle circles on his side with her thumb. What could she say?  _It won't happen again?_ She couldn't promise that, and she wouldn't insult him by trying.  _I know how you feel?_ She didn't.  _You won't_ let _it happen again?_ She'd have to truly  _loathe_ him to think  _that_ a good idea.

The only thing she could say to him was  _I'm here_ . She didn't need words for that. She never had.

"I knew I'd have to tell them one day," Garcia muttered after a while.

"I'll— I can be the one to tell them, for now. If that would help." Maybe it wouldn't even be necessary for a while. Elena knew, and what one girl knew, the other soon learned.

"They deserve not to be wondering," he said finally. "But I don't want them to know everything. Not yet."

She heard the quiet plea in his voice.  _I don't want to have to tell them everything yet. I don't want to batter their innocence yet. I want them to be older before we have to explain to them about things like that._

_I want their lives to be untouched by violence for much longer than Iris's was._

She shifted so she could be the one to pull him closer. He nestled against her chest. His quiet rumble of contentment went straight to her heart.

"What is it?" he murmured after a few minutes, without opening his eyes.

After this long, her chances of hiding her worry from him when they were twined together like this were nonexistent. Still, she hesitated. "How bad do you think it's going to be?"

"What?"

"This... new war."

He didn't reply right away. "It hasn't started yet. There's still a chance to stop it."

"Wyatt seemed to think if it wasn't there, it would be somewhere else," she whispered. "It feels like... I don't know. It feels like something's coming."

"Maybe not," he said firmly. "We don't know."

She flicked on the dim lamp to look down at him, because  _his_ chances of deceiving  _her_ were equally low. He meant what he said, and yet he'd never been one for false reassurances.

"It feels like we're on the brink," she said finally. "Of  _something_ ."

He'd fought in so many somethings. What did he make of all this?

"As long as it really is about water," he said after a while. "Saudi Arabia doesn't want to have to try to hold Ethiopian territory. It's a disaster. Ethiopia doesn't even have a coast. They'd be bogged down in hostile territory in two different countries. Vulnerable to guerillas." Dark amusement had crept into his voice. "A political disaster, too, on many levels. It's not something to seriously pursue if you have  _any_ other options, so... as long as it really is about the water, as long as no one's whipped the country into some kind of nationalistic frenzy over this— and I admit, I haven't been paying attention... then finding another way to get Saudi Arabia water has a decent shot at preventing war." He half-shrugged. "This could all even be a feint. Leverage in some deal."

His dispassionate soldier's analysis reassured her as actual reassurances would not have. "Mmm," she murmured. "Okay." She took a deep breath. "Okay."

He looked up at her, expression gentle. He didn't try to tell her it would be okay, just as she hadn't.

She lightly kissed him, and reached down for his hand. "When do you want to celebrate our movable anniversary this year?"

Because... they had no assurances about the future, about whether it would be all right, about whether  _it_ would happen again, about any of it, except for one: that they'd be side-by-side until death ripped them apart.

He snorted softly at the reminder that they never had picked a day. The options spanned a range from, what, May to October, and so their celebration varied quite widely, depending on their schedule. But it was August now, and they hadn't yet talked about it this year.

Footsteps interrupted them, and Elena padded inside. "I had a bad dream and I can't sleep," she whispered, on the verge of tears.

"Oh, no." Lucy sat up and patted the bed. Elena crawled up beside her and Lucy lifted her into her lap. "Want to talk about it?"

Elena shook her head. She often bottled things up, but she usually did find some comfort in talking it out eventually, so either the nightmare was too bad for her to share yet... or she'd been reading something she knew she shouldn't have been.

Then it came tumbling out as Lucy stroked her hair. Lucy met Garcia's eyes over Elena's head, horrified, as their six-year-old described elements identifiably from  _a Michael Crichton novel_ . She definitely hadn't read that here. Either at school, or at someone's house— Jiya and Rufus, maybe?

"And then I found this picture in one of Mom's books and—"

Lucy's stomach churned as Elena described it. First thing in the morning she was moving  _all_ her military history books to the top shelf. Possibly locking them up, because Alice was a little monkey and would thinking nothing of— oh God— climbing the shelves if Elena suggested it.

She didn't ask Elena why she'd read either of those books when she'd known better. Elena had suffered enough over it, and besides, Lucy could guess why she'd cracked open that history book: because the grown-ups had been worried about war.

She was proud to have such smart and clever children. But it hurt to watch them hurt  _themselves_ through their own cleverness.

"And it said the bad guys  _won_ ," she finished, pleadingly. She looked at Lucy, silently demanding an explanation.

Lucy and Garcia looked at each other. She would not make him be the one to say it, not tonight. "Dear heart, sometimes the bad guys do win," she said quietly.

Elena stared at her like her world was rocking on its axis. Lucy was glad, oh, so glad, that this was still a revelation to her at six. She wanted it to be unthinkable for many more years.

"At least, for a little while," she added, unable to resist the weight of the horror in Elena's big dark eyes.

" _Why?_ For how long? For forever?"

"No." Garcia's voice was rough, and a little thoughtful. "I don't think they win forever."

Elena looked slightly less alarmed.

Garcia stroked her hair. "Bring me a book and I'll read to you to put your mind on something else." He sat up as Elena hopped off the bed.

She came back just a minute later with a big book.

"That's what you want me to read?"

Elena nodded, and climbed into the middle of the bed.

"You must know most of the words to this one."

Elena nodded again and curled up on her side, eyes closed.

Garcia opened his mouth, closed it again, opened the book, and began to read: "The blue whale is the largest animal in the world..."

By the time Garcia reached minke whales, Elena was asleep.

Lucy looked over at Garcia, smiled, took the book from him, put it on her nightstand, and turned off the lamp.

**Author's Note:**

> When I finally watched the finale, I noticed that it and Only Way Out had converged on a few points that resembled each other. The bit with the boy asking for Rufus’s autograph is similar to the science fair scene, but predates my watching of the finale.
> 
> "EULALIA!" is the battle cry of the hares from Brian Jacques's _Redwall_ books.
> 
> “Screaming in terrored delight,” and the general idea, is a reference to this [Sheldon comic](http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/140822.html). 
> 
> I honestly have no idea where Margaret Hamilton’s papers ended up or if it’s plausible for some of them to be rediscovered today. Artistic license.


End file.
